The Road
by ShamrockNinny
Summary: One man chased by shadowed light, two boys hungering for a home, and the final man searching for understanding among his knowledge. An AU where it's just dirt, and road, bituminous reflections, and four people wandering with only each other.


**The Road**

* * *

"Then they set out along the blacktop in the gunmetal light, shuffling through the ash, each the other's world entire."

-Cormac McCarthy

* * *

Chapter 1: God Willing

* * *

"Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it."

* * *

There's a whisper of wind, the dead dry sky bleached blue to perfection and destructive monotony. He tilts his head, he listens, he hears the heavy heat slapping against the ground, wave after wave of furious assault, abandoned love, to beg the ground back up to it. It's old hat: that fly in the corner buzzing over a piece of Garula lard, the hole worn through the woven mat in his old convertible Wolseley which barely puts one mile in front of the other. No sympathy for the sun.

With a small soft sigh, lips pursing around those beads of sweat, lips dried and cracked, he opens his eyes and levies them against the wide vast landscape of jagged flat land which is pierced by a rising plateau to the north, a range of low lying rock scrabbling against sky and little vicious shrubs pushing out in a firm declaration against the death that is embodied in Leide.

"Ya gonna keep standing there?"

Gladiolus grunts, letting his eyes sift away the light and close.

"Got a problem with it old man?" He replies, sounding gruffer than he felt, softer than he meant to sound.

There is no response and the sun screams louder.

"Paw-paw!" That girl, her screech, her lovely lilting country accent.

Cid's just looking at Gladiolus.

"I'll get the hunt, if that's why you came over here, unless you just like harassing people."

Cid waits, Gladiolus lets his eyes slide back open and pretends not to feel the man's look.

"Paw-paw, guy in the garage says his car is done up in a bad way, but he's gone off saying he doesn't think a girl should be doing anything with his car."

Gladiolus, his last name put far away, his first even some hazy reflection of what was and is. He turns around, shrugging away the vastness for the isolation of just Hammerhead, just this small spot and just Cid Sophiar. Cindy is there behind Cid, plaid shirt rolled up to her biceps, ends rolled and knotted up against her ribs so her midriff shows, jeans tacky with oil, grease, dirt, a spot of cherry pop she'd been slurping.

"Tell 'im I'll kick his ass to Duscae, you do your job Cindy," Cid throws his head around, grizzled jaw made up of stretched skin, old and leathery.

Cindy lets out a tut-tut, wipes a hand against her jeans, then she sniffs and eyes Gladiolus with wary curiosity.

"A'right, Paw-paw," she answers, bouncing gait taking her back toward the garage.

Cid is peering through Gladiolus, blue eyes acting like they can see the world. Old man didn't know anything, nothing, maybe everything.

"Mind the sabertusks."

The wind whispers again and Gladiolus tilts his head, listens, hears the things he thought he'd forgotten. He'll try again tomorrow.

* * *

The reapertails causing the bustle, the hustle, the Hammerhead grocer, restaurant owner, Takka to lose his business, are out south of Longwythe Peak. Cid had even said, voice slipping up and cracking and actually giving the damn he gives every day in the secret of his eyes, little girl -four or five- had been ripped apart as fodder. Gladiolus hates, senseless because they're beasts with no sentiment and even less understanding.

Damn chocobo station is out of service, the girl managing the stalls saying some flat thing about a nearby race, a sickness, some excuse. Gladiolus drives, then he lets his tires wander, slowing down and thwacking against the sleeper lines, right side wheel dragging up dust as it touches down with dirt.

Gladiolus drags himself out of the car and hops the guardrail, setting off at a slow pace across the desert. His large two-handed sword, a block of heavy steel, is slung across his back, his ever present companion, the weight of-. Forget, slap it away, slip it down and under against slivered, split skin. Breath a sigh of relief and start walking like it's your first day under the same love jealous sun.

He's just a few meters away, crouched low, the reapertails sunk low to the ground in the shade of some shrubbery, large black curved claws twitching spasmodically, black eyes lackluster with the languor of the fervorous ball of gas ahead seeping into them.

There's soft footsteps -they think they're soft- and Gladiolus looks and sees a black clad, scrawny rat of black hair and pale skin turning pink. It's a hallucination, the male incarnate of someone in his distant past, his sin of failure. It's not though, it's real, a boy with a pitiful revolver, ages old, and a small sabre tied against his black trousered waist with black twine. Black boots, red soled, and trying to sneak up to the reapertails.

Gladiolus lets a cuss word slip across his tongue, rest at his mouth and depart in silent aim at Cid for daring to let someone else see his bounty, for sending a child, who thinks he's a man, to die. That or making it all fall into Gladiolus' hands.

The boy takes aim, hand shaking, the barrel unsteady, and fires. The reapertails rear up, one of them whipping its tail, stinger raising and tossing aside the brush. The three creatures are moving out, looking for something to kill. Gladiolus can get drunk, light headed, woozy at the thought of drawing blood and making violence upon what is peace.

The boy breaks cover, he should've stayed back and gotten in a few more shots, and pulls out his sabre, gun being pushed into his side pants pocket. A reapertail rushes forward, stinger flashing with sunlight, reflecting the harsh anger of love from the un-soothed sun, and the boy feebly wields the sabre.

Gladiolus shuts his eyes, he breathes in dust layered air, he thinks of death and then steps out. Surprise is a bitter way to kill something which does not think of the past, the present and the future as some unified existence. Gladiolus relishes it.

The boy is holding his own, he's hacked away the leg of a reapertail. Gladiolus turns to the third, he splits the chitinous shell, and it stridulates, noise short and final until it swells into the eternity that is Gladiolus not forgetting what he means to.

Gladiolus turns his eyes and gulps up the image of all three dead, the boy standing over a carcass, clutching a bleeding arm.

"Need a hand?" Gladiolus decides to be magnanimous, out under the sun, under the unending song.

The boy's dark blue eyes flash with fury, he shakes his head and begins to stalk away.

Gladiolus says nothing, he's beholden to nothing but his ghosts. He can't help but watch the black figure disappear in the wagging haze, bleak form of symbolic death, another corpse in his mausoleum of memory.

* * *

"Potions, I-I think," The voice is soft, a slight drawl which would be rudely impertinent if it weren't quaking with lack of surety and an undercurrent of fear.

Gladiolus looks and sees that his corpse has pulled itself from the grave he watched it wander into. The boy looks younger in the harsh light of the store, inky blackness threatening to press in from the outside. Gladiolus pauses in the threshold and steps in by a shelf of Ebony, eyes on his Lazarus.

"And a Phoenix Down" the boy is looking intensely at Jasp, the attending shopkeeper.

"It'll be a thousand gil."

Gladiolus watches the calculation of desperation pass over the boy's face.

"Just the potions." Is what is settled on.

The boy's arm is wrapped in a dirty white strip of cloth, blood soaked through in an oval patch, the ends dancing like little white hands entertaining the macabre.

He turns. Eyes widen at Gladiolus' presence, and then settle on a nervous disinterest. Gladiolus' Lazarus steps out into the light of the gas station. Gladiolus takes a moment to step out after. Gladiolus notes the direction he steps.

Gladiolus is at Cid's then, a few large steps that way, Cindy fuming at a truck that has a stubborn will to die. Cid is putting tools away, ready to close the garage. He sees Gladiolus and turns.

"Let the boy take the catch," Cid states.

Gladiolus grunts and turns away. Morality won't be pushed on him, nor grafted in his skin by old men, or crowned upon his head by fate. Still, it beguiles him into following the invisible path of Lazarus.

There isn't even a tent pitched, just one sleeping bag filled with a blonde headed boy and a rough blanket that is empty of its owner. Instead Lazarus is kneeling by the blonde, a potion being maneuvered between the two. Gladiolus steps closer. He understands.

The blonde is flushed with fever, his body is trembling, his lips are parted and breaths pass in wheezes as if he is a chain smoker gasping through just one last paper cylinder of meaning and faith. Lazarus, as Gladiolus will now see him, is shaking as well. Reapertails are the silent stealers in the hours past their striking, a potion will do neither of them any good.

"That's not gonna help," Gladiolus says.

Lazarus spins, blue eyes hazed with the poison. He says nothing. Did Lazarus speak after rising; the veil of death lifted was he left dumb at the prospect of life's only purpose stolen away so cruelly?

Gladiolus steps closer. Lazarus raises his sabre.

"We don't have gil," Lazarus supplies.

"Didn't say I wanted it."

There is silence and the boy adjusts his grip on his weapon.

"Your friend is gonna die."

Lazarus grunts. Or maybe he says nothing but silence.

"Get packed," Gladiolus demands.

The boy blinks. Gladiolus considers it all. He stoops, unzips the cheap, stained sleeping bag and reveals a boy around his Lazarus' age. Another body to keep from being a corpse, another ghost he'll keep from haunting him. He hitches the boy into his arms and stands up. He'd rented a trailer earlier. Lazarus follows, he weaves on his feet.

In the trailer, Gladiolus lays the boy down, sees the other half dead and lays him beside the other. Good gil goes out, spent on them, wasted, saved, invested, put into some worthless invaluable cause of life.

He leaves to gather the items left behind. The sleeping bag has the name 'Prompto' written in marker black on its tag. Gladiolus returns to the trailer, takes the saber from the gripped fist of Lazarus and reads the name 'Noctis'.


End file.
